A research team from the University of Liverpool has reached an important milestone towards creating a urine diagnostic test for prostate cancer that could mean current invasive diagnostic procedures for this cancer may become a thing of the past.

‘The use of a gas chromatography (GC)-sensor system (odoreader) combined with advanced statistical methods towards the diagnosis of urological malignancies’, published recently in the Journal of Breath Research, describes a diagnostic test using a special tool to ‘smell’ the cancer in men’s urine. Working in collaboration with the University of the West of England’s Urological Institute team at Southmead Hospital and Bristol Royal Infirmary, the pilot study included 155 men presenting to urology clinics. The detection rates for bladder cancer was 96% accurate and 90% for prostate cancer. The results of this study indicate that the GC sensor system is able to successfully identify different patterns of volatile compounds that allow classification of urine samples from patients with urological cancers